Scenarios and Procedures for Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003: Planning and Deployment

This book provides you with a roadmap to develop a deployment plan for your Microsoft® Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 and SMS 2003 SP1 sites by offering a prescriptive guide with flowcharts, task lists, and job aids. In addition, this book directs you to the relevant conceptual, planning, and operational material that you might need to develop a deployment strategy. Each flowchart includes decisions for you to consider and action items for you to take.

This book recommends hardware configurations, site configurations, and other sizing and capacity-related information. You can use this information to begin establishing appropriate configurations in your test and pilot environments. These recommendations do not represent the minimum configurations that SMS 2003 supports. Rather, they treat SMS 2003 as a mission critical application and are provided in that context.

It is important that you develop a thorough and complete strategy for deploying SMS 2003 in your organization. The information in this book can help you develop such a strategy. Although the scenarios in this book are prescriptive, they are meant to be adaptable to the unique needs of your organization instead of providing a solution that fits every organizational model. You should use the scenarios in this book as guidelines for developing your own implementation strategy.

This book builds on the conceptual information that is presented in the Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Concepts, Planning, and Deployment Guide. Although it is not essential that you have already read the Microsoft® Systems Management Server 2003 Concepts, Planning, and Deployment Guide, it is strongly recommended that you do so to enhance your understanding of the material contained in this book.

When appropriate, this book links you to additional information about a topic. You can find content that is specific to SMS 2003 SP1 and SMS 2003 SP2 by searching for the text string *SP. This book also refers to tools that you can use to help collect information and plan your deployment. For example, several planning worksheets have been included to help you collect useful information about your deployment needs. You can find these tools by searching for the term “planning guide.”

In this book